Ghost trouble

[Xcalibur]

I have an image i created on a compaq evo desktop. It's a rather general image containing basically an installation of Win2k, office programs, and corporate settings. I deployed the image to a IBM thinkpad laptop and had no trouble during the dump, but when I attempted to boot it, it seemed to get stuck at the windows loading screen. This makes sense to me because the image came from a compaq desktop and is being loaded onto an IBM thinkpad. I was told though, that in order to fix this issue I could simply run Win2K's repair program, and after it should be fine. Well I did, but during the repair process it gets to the step where it is installing or detecting new devices, and at this point it hangs. I let it run for about an hour and a half and there was no activity whatsoever. If anyone has experience with ghosting I would greatly appreciate any input. Thanks.

X

 

[LiLithTecH]

Actually it is probably the IDE Controllers that are causing the problem.

If you remove them before imaging the machine, you can basically use
that Image on every machine.

Other good things to remove are Video drivers (stick with standard VGA),
Sound/Audio drivers and NIC drivers.

Combine Ghost with SYSPREP and you can work with 1 base image file.

 

[Agamar]

Yep, you could use sysprep, but if you have a few machines of that type, I like making images specific to that machine. Nothing like a machine going to crap and reloading it and having it ready in less that 1 hour.

 

[SaigonK]

Originally posted by: Xcalibur
I have an image i created on a compaq evo desktop. It's a rather general image containing basically an installation of Win2k, office programs, and corporate settings. I deployed the image to a IBM thinkpad laptop and had no trouble during the dump, but when I attempted to boot it, it seemed to get stuck at the windows loading screen. This makes sense to me because the image came from a compaq desktop and is being loaded onto an IBM thinkpad. I was told though, that in order to fix this issue I could simply run Win2K's repair program, and after it should be fine. Well I did, but during the repair process it gets to the step where it is installing or detecting new devices, and at this point it hangs. I let it run for about an hour and a half and there was no activity whatsoever. If anyone has experience with ghosting I would greatly appreciate any input. Thanks. X

Try this out :

http://www.anandtech.com/guides/viewfaq.html?i=115

The FAQS have a ton of info on Sysprep and Ghost, you shouldnt have to make a bunch of images.
I have one global image for all of my desktops and laptops.

About 15 different laptop models and about 7 different desktop models.
Dell Latitude cpxh, cpi, cpxj, c600, c610, c400, c410, D600, D400, C640, C800, Toshiba 3120, Toshiba 7100 series, Compaq models..you name it.

 

[Xcalibur]

Thanks guys. I did run sysprep on the machine. I didn't change any vga options or anything. Once I had the machine configured the way I wanted, I ran sysprep and ripped the image. I tried the repair again and it still get stuck during the "Setup is detecting and installing devices on your computer" step. I let it run for a day and it made no progress. I did try to do a clean install of Win2K without formatting. This worked, but of coarse the registry was new and all the links from the software and updates were non-existent. Thanks alot for any insight.

 

[seismik]

I have one global image for all of my desktops and laptops.

No kidding? I make an image for every different type of machine we run -- I've had huge problems with trying to put an image created on a Dell onto a Compaq and so forth. I've got about 15 different images for the different machine types we run.

 

[Xcalibur]

I was successfully able to put the image onto a Dell desktop. After I loaded it, I followed the instructions from SaigonK and then ripped a new image from that one. I tried to load the new one onto the IBM ThinkPad but I got the same results as before. Any ideas?